The Pentax K-S2 D-SLR packs a lot of features into its weather-sealed body, but its burst shooting capability is very limited and its companion Wi-Fi app needs some work.

Despite its name, the Pentax K-S2 ($699.95, body only) isn't a replacement for last year's K-S1, it's simply the second entry in the company's new line of midrange D-SLRs. The K-S2 has many of the features you'd expect to find in a Pentax camera, including full weather sealing, and the dual control dials and pentaprism viewfinder that other SLR makers reserve for more expensive models. But it's not without its foibles; video quality leaves a lot to be desired, with no continuous AF option available, the burst shooting buffer is very limited, and the companion Wi-Fi app needs some serious work. Another Pentax camera, the K-3, is our current Editors' Choice for SLRs under $1,000. It's an older model, but still quite capable, and available at a very good price because of the introduction of its successor, the K-3 II ($1,099.95).

Design and FeaturesThe K-S2 is about the same size as other SLRs in its class. It measures 3.6 by 4.8 by 2.6 inches (HWD) and weighs about 1.4 pounds without a lens. For a long time Pentax had a considerable advantage in compact design when it came to SLRs, but that gap has narrowed; the Canon EOS Rebel SL1 (3.6 by 4.6 by 2.7 inches, 13.1 ounces) and the Nikon D5500 (3.8 by 4.9 by 2.8 inches, 14.7 ounces) are both in the same size class, and are both lighter.

We're reviewing the K-S2 as a body only, but it can also be had in a kit with the compact, retractable SMC DA-L 18-50mm F4-5.6 DC WR RE zoom for $799.95. Pentax often markets its cameras in various colors, and at press time there are a several variations available: Black, Black and Orange, Black and Pink, Black with Racing Stripe, White, White and Lime, White with Racing Stripe, Forest Green, Stone Gray, and the Desert Beige that I received for review.

The K-S2 may be on the small side, but its control layout is solid. There aren't any buttons to the left of the hot shoe and flash on the top plate—there's no room—but to the right you'll find the standard mode dial, the Pentax Green button, an exposure compensation button, and the Wi-Fi button. The shutter release and the power switch sit ahead of the top buttons; it's a three-stage switch, with dedicated positions for taking stills and video. A front control dial sits ahead of it on the hand grip.

The left side of the body houses a toggle switch to change between manual and autofocus, a mechanical release for the pop-up flash, and the Raw/Fx button. The latter can be reprogrammed; I set it to activate depth of field preview, which is a feature that's absent from other other midrange SLRs, including the Nikon D5500. I was disappointed that the focus selector only had two positions; the three-position switch that Pentax used on the K-5 IIs was a favorite of mine, as it allowed for very quick changes between continuous and standard autofocus modes.

Rear controls include a button to toggle Live View, squeezed in the corner to the left of the optical viewfinder, and a control dial and AF/AE-L button to the right of the eyepiece. A four-way control pad sits to the right of the LCD, with directional controls for ISO, the drive mode, white balance, and flash settings. Holding down the center OK button switches its function to manual autofocus point selection. Playback, Info, and Menu options round out the rear buttons.

When you're not in Live View mode, the rear display shows current camera settings, including the aperture, shutter speed, ISO, exposure compensation value, metering pattern, focus mode, active focus point, and other sundry information. The LCD itself is plenty big at 3 inches, and sharp at 921k dots. It's mounted on a hinge—a first for a Pentax SLR—and can swing out from the body, face up, down, and all the way forward. You can also hide the LCD against the body, which will protect it from damage.

Hiding the LCD away also forces you to think about framing images via the optical finder, and takes away the temptation to review each photo after it's been shot—which can take you out of the moment. The K-S2 uses a solid glass pentaprism viewfinder with 100 percent frame coverage, a rarity in entry-level and midrange SLRs. Competing models from Canon and Nikon, including Canon's newest T6i and T6s models, instead use a pentamirror design to bounce light to your eye. This type of finder is lighter and less expensive to produce, but also typically smaller and dimmer than a glass prism.

Wi-Fi is built into the K-S2, a first for a Pentax SLR. It works in conjunction with the free Ricoh Image Sync app, available for iOS and Android. Connecting the camera to my iPhone 6 Plus was easy enough; the K-S2 broadcasts its own network, and displays its password in the camera menu. Simply press and hold the top Wi-Fi button on the camera until the screen says that Wi-Fi is enabled, then connect to the K-S2's network via your phone's settings menu.

That's where the ease ends. To call the Ricoh Image Sync app unintuitive is like calling Watergate a minor incident in Richard Nixon's political career. It's a mess. It's easy to browse images that are stored on the camera's memory card, but if you want to copy them to your phone you've first got to select them with a blue check mark, then press and hold a photo until a pop-up display of icons in circles opens on the screen, and have the wherewithal to understand that the icon that resembles a camera with a Wi-Fi signal strength indicator over it is the one you should press to copy them to your device. This is, of course, if the menu stays on the screen. More often than not it would pop open and immediately shrink back into the ether on my device. This led to me sitting in front of my phone, pressing, and pressing, and pressing, until the menu remained active long enough to press the transfer button.

Transfers are slow: a JPG requires about 30 seconds, which is just unacceptable. If you want to get that JPG over to your main camera roll you must press and hold it, then tap the icon that resembles a smartphone. What's further frustrating is that the app allows you to transfer Raw images and videos as well, but once you've waited for them to copy over (and they take forever), they're nowhere to be found.

Image transfer woes aside, the app is a pretty solid performer when it comes to remote control shooting. The Live View feed is a little laggy, but not terribly so, and it provides access to full manual shooting controls, and allows you to tap on an area of the frame to focus.

Performance and ConclusionsThe K-S2 is a responsive camera, but it's not the fastest model that the company has to offer. It starts and captures an in-focus image in about 1.3 seconds, focuses in about 0.07-second, and can capture short bursts of images at 5.5fps. I did find the short burst capability to be limited—it only captures 7 JPGs, 5 Raw, or 4 Raw+JPG shots before slowing down. The K-3 shoots at 8.1fps and can capture about 25 images before slowing down, regardless of file format.

The autofocus system is the same 11-point design found in the K-S1. It's not the best Pentax has to offer (again, look to the K-3's 27-point system for that), but I was able to get in-focus shots of larger birds in flight when pairing the camera with the DA* 60-250mm F4 ED (IF) SDM lens and setting it to AF-C mode. But again, the small shooting buffer limits the K-S2's usefulness for capturing sports and wildlife. In low light, focus is a little slow, requiring about 0.8-second to lock on. Live View focus is also on the slow side—0.6-second in bright light and 2.6 seconds in dim conditions.

We're reviewing the K-S2 as a body only, but it is available in a kit along with the SMC DA-L 18-50mm F4-5.6 DC WR RE lens at a $100 premium. It's the first retractable lens that Pentax has offered, and like the camera body it has a weather-resistant design. At press time Pentax is not selling the lens on its own. However, it does sell the HD DA 18-50mm F4-5.6 DC WR RE. Aside from a different lens coating, and the fact that the HD version includes a hood, the lenses are identical from a mechanical and optical perspective.

The 18-50mm lens is reasonably sharp, although distortion is an issue. At 18mm f/4 the lens scores 1,939 lines per picture height on an Imatest center-weighted sharpness test, a bit better than the 1,800 lines we require to call a photo sharp. Edges are just a little soft, showing about 1,700 lines, but that's not out of the ordinary for a kit lens. There's a modest overall improvement in the image score at f/5.6 (2,041 lines), and the score remains steady at f/8. The lens shows about 1.9 percent barrel distortion at its widest setting, which adds a noticeable outward curve to images.

Zooming to about the midpoint narrows the maximum aperture to f/4.5, but the lens still produces solid results at 35mm. It scores 2,050 lines wide open, with edges that hover around 1,700, and improves to 2,139 lines with 1,800-line edges at f/5.6. Peak performance is at f/8, with an average sharpness score of 2,200 lines and edges that just cross the 2,000 line mark. Distortion isn't an issue at 35mm.

At 50mm the light-gathering capability is modest, just f/5.6. But the lens is crisp at 2,115 lines, and edges are pretty good at 1,741 lines. Stopping down to f/8 improves the overall sharpness to 2,200 lines, with edges that are just shy of 2,000 lines. There is a bit of pincushion distortion, about 1 percent, which is noticeable in lab tests but should be less of an issue in the field; it's unlikely that you'll be using this lens for serious architectural photography, after all.

The K-S2 uses a 20-megapixel image sensor that omits an optical low pass filter—so images are, generally speaking, crisper than a camera that uses an OLPF—and it includes in-body image stabilization. This allows you to use lower ISOs in dim lighting, and it can also be used to simulate the effects of an OLPF for those times when you're shooting a subject that is prone to exhibiting color moiré patterns.

I used Imatest to see how much noise shows up in images with the OLPF simulation disabled. When shooting JPG images at default settings, the K-S2 keeps noise under 1.5 percent through ISO 3200, which is a good, but not stellar, result. At ISO 6400 noise increases to 1.9 percent, but some aggressive in-camera noise reduction drops the figure down to 1.5 percent at ISO 12800. I took a close look at images from our ISO test sequence (included in the slideshow that accompanies this review) on a calibrated NEC MultiSync PA271W display, and was happy to see that images are still very crisp at ISO 3200. There is some smudging of detail at ISO 6400, but you should still feel comfortable pushing the camera that far when shooting JPGs. ISO 12800 is a bit too blurry for my tastes, as is ISO 25600, and the top ISO 51200 sensitivity shouldn't be used when capturing JPGs.

If you shoot in Raw you can push the camera a bit further and get a sharp image. There's a heck of a lot of noise at ISO 51200, but you can still make out details through the grain. ISO 25600 is very useable in Raw if you don't mind some roughness, and ISO 12800 should make most available light photographers happy. Raw image crops, developed in Adobe Lightroom CC using default settings, are also included in the slideshow. When pushed to its extreme settings in Raw format, the K-S2 lags just behind the Nikon D5500 in terms of image detail.

The K-S2 records 1080p30 video in QuickTime format. The footage is as sharp and crisp as you'd expect from HD video, but there are some drawbacks. A rolling shutter effect is evident, and it gives motion a bit of a jelly-like look, which is less than ideal. Video autofocus is fairly quick, but it has to be initiated manually via the rear AF/AE-L button—there's no continuous autofocus available when recording video. Voices come up loud and clear on the soundtrack, but you can hear the 18-50mm lens as it changes focus. Pentax does include an external mic port if you want to capture high-quality audio with your video. There's also a micro HDMI port to connect to an HDTV, and a standard micro USB port. And you get a dedicated card slot for SD/SDHC/SDXC card formats. An external battery charger is included.

The Pentax K-S2 is an attractive option for photographers who don't put an emphasis on video capture. Its 20-megapixel image sensor omits a low pass filter to maximize clarity, and the shake reduction system can also simulate the effects of an OLPF to eliminate color moiré. The weather-sealed design lets you shoot in any condition without worry, and the very basic 18-50mm kit lens that's available in a bundle with the camera is also sealed. But along with disappointing video capture, the built-in Wi-Fi is very slow, and the autofocus system isn't quite the equal of another Pentax body, our Editors' Choice K-3. The K-3 is an older model, and it won't be available forever, so Pentax shooters in the market for a body at around this price point should grab one while they can.

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About the Author

Lead camera analyst for the PCMag consumer electronics reviews team, Jim Fisher is a graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he concentrated on documentary video production. Jim's interest in photography really took off when he borrowed his father's Hasselblad 500C and light meter in 2007. He honed his writing skills at retailer B&H... See Full Bio

Pentax K-S2

Pentax K-S2

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